Blanking Bridges
by MidnightCereal
Summary: Shinji and Asuka return to Tokyo-3 after eight years. Yup, that's it. Some language. One shot.


Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Blanking Bridges

By Midnight_Cereal

Asuka had determined it was going to burn.

I learned this at a pit stop in Hazu, when I popped the trunk to find two gas cans guarding my Fall of Goat Island CD.

We would visit Hikari. Spur of the moment. I would drive and Asuka would pack; we shook on it in her bare Nagoya loft lording over Higashiyama Park. Between slurps of shark fin ramen, Asuka insisted on the deal. The compromise. As the signs for Tokyo-3 grow frequent, ward-specific, I tell myself I insisted on it, too.

Arrows and numbers and kanji all funnel Asuka and I into Ohno Mountain Tunnel as she dials down the volume on track 3: _One Flew Over_ or something or other. It's the best song, meaning it's the most urgent one, meaning Asuka hates it. I become satisfied with letting the muffled bass line beat on my chest.

"Just what did you think I'm going to fill them with?" she asks.

"I didn't even know they were back there."

"Poo on you. Maybe you should be more suspicious when I ask you to do things for me," says Asuka. She sucks her teeth_, tsk, tsk, tsk_.

"So you're saying I shouldn't trust you?"

"Yeah, exactly." She gives me a small shove on my shoulder. "Okay, bad joke. I'm just saying that premium outlets go up on prime real estate like that all the time. If you can't get away from the city you still have to get away from the city."

"Yeah."

"They razed Wondergirl's place months ago, did you know that? It's time I did my part." If Asuka was waiting for me to nod or shrug it off, I disappoint her. She leans forward, far enough to be irradiated by the day glow dashboard. The position makes it easier for her to pierce the corner of my eye with a neon green smile. "Come on. Our old place, it's a blight. It's an affront to revisionist history. And we were the only ones living in it, anyway. It was just a matter of time before someone knocked it over."

"Then maybe you should just let them take it down," I say. "They're professionals."

"Exactly."

I glance sideways at the blur of white tile and dashed lights peeling off to reveal Tokyo-3 – the new one, the city on Mandelbrot Lake – molten night life surging between its skyscrapers. The view should warm me, melt me, but my ghost in the window keeps cold; or steadfast, I like steadfast better. Because I've been driving for six straight hours, with Asuka prowling the passenger seat. I am determined to share her with Hikari tonight.

Between chest thumps of tempo Asuka stops looking at me – she stops grinning. I don't think she can do either while charging her voice with that kryptonite compassion: "You look so worried, Shinji. Don't be. You're pretty much the most retardant thing ever."

It's a joke, most likely. Some English pun at my expense. I tell myself it has something to do with me missing our exit.

* * *

Hikari Horaki has that disease, the one where some strain of proficiency seeps from her pores; that presses her curtains and shampoos her carpet; that sweetens her tea and tarts her pies; that cuffs and coddles baby sisters – the one where you hardly notice the wiping of tears or bandaging of cuts or salving of burns because the pie is so unbelievably good.

"It's an easy recipe." Hikari's propping up her smile with a fist as she sits with me and Asuka, her embroidered sleeves falling to her elbow. She's dropped the pigtails, but kept the freckles, which brings out the wholesomeness in her chocolate eyes. "It's yours if you want it."

I'm going to say sure. I'm going to ask Asuka for her slice, which she hasn't so much as wounded. I lick raspberry cobbler from the roof of my mouth, swallow, and almost ask Hikari about Touji Suzahara.

"Of course he wants it. Big wad of good it'll do him, though. You can't fix _blah_." Thanks, Asuka.

"I don't see why it just has to be for him. Why don't you try? Why don't…" Hikari's eyes go wide and she gasps – she's choking on an awkward piece of demented fantasy. "Why don't you two do it together?"

Asuka stops shepherding the pie slice on her plate. The eyebrow she raises at Hikari is bent and queer.

"It's a vote," Hikari answers. "You get to vote for how Shinji cooks for you, like Nozomi does with me. The hardest part is letting someone else help, and you don't have that problem with Shinji."

"I _don't_ have that problem with Shinji." Asuka holds me with a wink and a curly-q smirk.

"I sauté the chicken and onions and the carrots," Hikari continues, "and she takes charge of the spices. I can't make it any other way, now; I try to, but Nozomi won't let me. We do it on Tuesdays – you should've come on Tuesday!"

"I give lectures on Tuesday," says Asuka.

"Yeah," I say, "I'm _blah_ on Tuesday." The sound Hikari makes while getting up is an eighth-hearted chuckle; and that's all I'm looking for, pity applause for the effort. I don't know what it means when Asuka deep throats the raspberry gore off my fork.

The rolodex Hikari brings back to the table is a sad thing, overstuffed. She runs a finger over its index cards –which are compressed by love, maybe explosive tension – searching for the name or number or recipe she can remove without making the thing go off. "Oh, just write it down for him, you big fat showoff," says Asuka.

"That's big fat improviser." Hikari gives her head a slow shake. "I don't actually remember the original recipe, which is the problem. The kids all like so many different things. They just, they end up filling everything."

"The kids or the things?" I ask.

"I wish you could stay another day," Hikari answers. I could be imagining her cheeks growing a bit rosy, sure, but then the kinks in her breath start to smooth out. "You could come down to the daycare. They practically know you already because I tell all of them about you…I said that already, didn't I?"

"Yes," says Asuka.

"Asuka, they adore you. I showed them your picture, you remember, um, your strawberry-print yukata? Eiji – Hiroko, from 3A, that's her boy – I caught him hiding it in his lunch bag. The girls always talk about how you wore your hair back then. They just love you. I tell them about all of us. Not that I ever did anything as exciting."

"I wouldn't have called it exciting," says Asuka.

"Well, you know what I…" Hikari's voice creaks along like old midnight floorboards. "Of course not." It takes a second for Hikari to discover the black knot buried in the pinewood grain of the table. She smiles at it before getting up again, pushing her sleeves back up her forearms, and squeezing the sponge from the back of the sink.

If she wants my help with the dishes, she'll ask.

* * *

Nozomi Horaki has that disease, the one where some strain of deficiency seeps from her pores; that splashes her curtains and smears her carpet; that spills her tea and drops her pies; that miffs and mollifies older sisters – the one where you hardly notice the molding of clay or painting of canvases or sculpting of torsos because the pie is so unbelievably mashed into the carpet.

Tonight, I get to stay in her room. It is a swelter of crippled easels, dirty bras, and crumpled acrylic paint tubes. But with Asuka sharing Hikari's bed tonight, it does make possible the least awkward of our potential sleeping arrangements; Asuka totally nailed an impression of herself earlier, announcing how if she and I shared a room, I'd just end up awake all night, undressing her with my eyes. Then she announced she was taking a shower.

The consequence of looking for space to drop my bag is that I have to take inventory of Nozomi's room. I keep trying to separate things – futon, pillow, drawer, floor, ceiling – when really, it's a jungle. An environment this lush isn't meant to be parsed and catalogued. When I hear knocking, I tell myself I'm happy with just knowing where the door is. Happier with watching Hikari open, slog through, and close it; if she doesn't mind the uncinched button on the V-neck of her pajama top, then neither do I.

When she looks at me, I make sure I'm studying a spot on the ceiling, the one where a color wheel exploded. "It's a Murakami," I say, looking back down.

"It's a disaster. She's been a cyclone since her exhibition." The flapping motion she makes as she slaps her thighs flashes the floral trunks beneath her shirt. "You're so good to put up with this."

I give a good shrug, laying to rest the hope she'd invite me to sleep in the living room. "I have lots of practice – thank Misato."

"Maybe later. But let's do this, now, she can't stay in the shower forever." Hikari plops down on a slope of cargo pants and wrinkled tees, sinking so far into it I fear she's being swallowed by its designer maw. She pats the spot next to her instead of covering up the little bit of her that's going a long way.

"You didn't ask me about Touji," she says.

My lips taste like cinnamon mouthwash. "It's not really my place."

"Of course it's your place…" I'm not as stunned to find myself sitting next to Hikari as I am by the weight of the two paper scraps she places in my hand: it is indeed a very easy recipe; and though I don't recognize the phone number that goes with it, I've obliterated this street in a hundred-hundred simulations. "You're sure you can't stay another day? Forget about the space – Nozomi loves driving Kodama crazy."

"I'm sorry. Asuka really does have to teach class on Tuesday."

"It's a bit random." Hikari plucks a lint specimen from the culture on her sleeve. "You two coming all this way on a Sunday just to see me…I'm a little flattered."

"Asuka was itching to make time for you. I don't know. This is the best she can do until a sabbatical, and who knows when that'll be."

"You made time for me, too," she says.

"I came because Asuka came. I didn't really think about it." I don't think I should have said that. I watch the glow on Hikari's face flicker, and know I shouldn't have. "I don't mind being here if you don't mind."

"Nagoya isn't exactly down the street."

"It's for our jobs."

"You can do better than that," Hikari says, chuckling. "Elaborate for me, Shinji? You make it sound like partnering. I love partnering. I eat it up! Is it a conference? The Nagoya Economic Geography and Graphic Design Conference in Tokyo-3?"

"Acoustic Design."

"They don't teach lying at the Nagoya School of Acoustic Design, do they?"

"Hikari-"

"Or fair exchange of information?"

"It's for our old jobs." The glow's gone. Now Hikari's just staring at me. Right above my line of sight, at my mind, before she drags her eyes down to my own. "I didn't want to say anything – I don't want to get you into trouble. It's not paper work. It's not a mission, either. It's the end, I hope it is, and that's all that really matters."

Hikari swallows. It at least goes down in her smooth enough that she doesn't change her face anymore. She's a good citizen of Old Tokyo-3. She's Code 707 – we're talking one of its class representatives. She's one of us. She will never pay for anything I ever tell her with more than a frown.

"Tell Ayanami I said hi," she says.

"I can do that."

"Tell her she looks great without all those damn bandages. I know she does."

"I'm sure she does."

"Tell her about Pen-Pen. She liked him, I could tell. Remember her at your little dirty synch session? With Asuka?"

Oh, jeez. "Yeah..."

"Tell her we buried him in National Park, inside his fridge, with his steering wheel." I blink, wanting to scratch between my brain and ears. Hikari's the one shaking her head. "The spare wheel he had with him when we adopted him? Always rolled it around with his, uh, little flipper? No? Well, trust me, it was precious."

"I believe you," I say. Then I remember. "It was Misato's…"

"He had, you know, his collar, his ice box. He had her wheel, but that was it. The first few days after we took him in, we were going to give him right back. All that penguin sick…" Hikari shakes her head, "wasn't natural..."

"Pen-Pen wasn't natural. You should've seen Misato's heating bill."

"You should have seen our dad's heating bill," says Hikari.

"But you kept him and that's what counts." Now I'm thinking about how to get her to stop cocking her head at me. "I'm not saying you didn't have it difficult, but you didn't live in our apartment. You didn't have to see Asuka or Misato there, or, or _talk_ to them. Not like I was any better. We were three different flavors and it, it's just…there wasn't anything…" Nozomi painted a dog on the far opposite wall. I blow at his wet spaghetti torso. "There wasn't anything good left in that place."

"And Asuka feels the same way?" she asks.

"That's something you'd have to ask her."

"But I did, Shinji. And guess what?" Hikari nods at me, clutching at wrinkled trousers snaking out from under her. "She knows a lot about 'Post-Second Impact Spatial Analysis in the Chūbu Region as related to Tobler's Law'."

"She's only…" I start, but she nods slower, compressing the space between us, stretching it. If I let her gum up my words, she's never going to let me build my nest and sleep. "Look, it's hard for her to come back here. But I think once she's finished what she has to do, she'll be back to see you. She'll visit and it'll be for more than just one day."

"Is that so?" she asks.

"I promise," I say.

"Let's not go crazy."

"Alright."

_Alright_. Hikari likes this word enough to mouth it before pushing up off the couch-thing. She catches up to the Hikari Horaki who is horrified by the state of her little sister's room. "I swear, I don't even know how a person gets to have so much stuff."

"Stuff is a good thing," I say. She stops her trudge through the art muck so she can look back at me. "No, really. You should only start to worry if you walk in one day and there's nothing in here at all."

She tries on another oversized smile; what Hikari needs, really, is a mirror. "Let me know when you're back in Nagoya, Shinji."

"Sure."

"Goodnight," she tells me. "Let me know."

* * *

The piñata in Nozomi's room is filled with salsa.

* * *

By 10:30 the next morning, Asuka and I are crossing into downtown on the Yumoto Super Bridge, which is bowed over Mandelbrot Lake. We'd have left Hikari's sooner had I not made such a good case for showering, eating breakfast, and getting dressed. Necessities like those always erode cavities in hard schedules – spaces Hikari and I filled with goodbye.

"Hope you didn't forget anything," says Asuka. "It's not like we'll have a chance to go back." In the corner of my eye, she leans forward to loop a small black band around the stem of her ponytail, S.O.P. for Sohryu Getting Shit Done; it just got that much harder to get a word in edgewise.

I try to, anyway. "Just how long are you planning on being down here?" I ask.

"Longer than it takes to check off my shopping list; not a lot of items with long lead times. Also, we're not committing arson in the cover of broad daylight…" She knifes upright, spring loaded, and studies me. "Oh, please, please tell me you didn't think that was what we were going to do…"

I feel my chin dimple as I switch lanes. That gets Asuka to shrug and crane her neck back out. She can see the tops of the skyscrapers, all growing tall and fat on our shrinking distance from them. And I still think of them that way: _Growing_. Ha ha. Some things never change. Or they change so much I marvel at them against my will. "Try to enjoy yourself, Shinji. It looks to be a jungle in there."

"I don't think I can kill half a day here," I say.

"Not my problem."

"I'm sure there's lots to do, it's that I don't live here anymore and I don't know where to do it."

"Well, what do you expect me to do about it?"

"I don't know. Nothing…" I drum the steering wheel, darting my eyes to the empty CD player in the dash. Run flat tires drone against the asphalt deck. The buzzing shimmies through the wishbone suspension; it vibrates between my toes. "I just think we could've stayed at Hikari's, that's all."

"Look," says Asuka. I look at her, nearly killing us both. She explains over the gaggle of car horns, "It's Monday. People work on Monday. They drink their cinnamon dolce lattes on Monday – from their thermoses. They put on their wingtips and their Chelsea boots and their promote-me-pumps on Monday. They drive and take the train and fart on the bus on Monday. They drop off their pee-pants toddlers at daycare on Monday. So Hikari works on Monday."

"And I think it'd be fun to visit her there."

"Whatever," says Asuka.

"What? She offered."

"Of course she offered." Asuka throws one leg over the other, bouncing a calf across her knee. "Hikari wouldn't be Hikari if she didn't. She can't help herself. It's sad."

"I don't feel sad for her," I say.

"I didn't say you have to," says Asuka.

"Do you have to?"

"…Okay." Asuka uncrosses her legs, and claps: she's ending a prayer; she's crushing a fly. "You want me to say she seems content? You want me to say she has it good? Fine. She does and she does. It's Sesame Street awesome, you little muppet. Of course I'm happy for Hikari. Why the hell wouldn't I be? I mean...shit, she's only the best friend I ever had in this huge den of suck. I just didn't think she needed to be entertaining us while little Eiji is throwing down on a macaroni and glue burrito. I just didn't think I needed to carve 'Hikari Is My Friend' into my forehead for you to believe it's true. God forbid that after living in Japan for nine years, I've learned to appreciate what's _not_ being said."

I prepare to enjoy myself.

A sign informs us we're five-hundred meters out from city side when Asuka starts to breathe again. She uses her last bit of rocket fuel to whip the air conditioning dial to ON. Cool breath from the dash washes over us as Asuka snaps a glossy leaf of one of her glamour mags. At a hundred meters out, she gasps. "Hey, they have a Paul Stuart here," she says.

* * *

We parked in a garage that spiraled up like the empty skin of an apple. I didn't ask Asuka where she was going, and she didn't tell me, but she did say that at seven, we'd hook back up at the Tōgendai Music Pavilion on Pier 3. Good deal. Great. After we split up I walked into the first convenience store I saw, plucked a ramen soda from a display cooler, and asked the counter clerk how to find the Tōgendai Music Pavilion on Pier 3. Then I asked her how to find Pier 3.

The pier is a broad, brick-laid finger pointing across the water to the control lock. A tour guide took measured backwards steps behind me while explaining that the lock was engineered to mediate the flow of water between the natural lake and Mandelbrot, the flooded crater the city sits on. I waited for his flock to pass before turning my back on the pier, tethering my memory to it as I hiked down the concrete canyon shading Boulevard One.

A corner music shop found me four blocks from Ginza-3. An unmanned string quartet loitered on a display podium inside, waiting for someone to give them sound. I ended up playing Gigue from Suite Number Five after letting it slip to the owner I had learned the cello; it's now half past six, and I've finally convinced myself the other patrons weren't clapping because I eventually stopped.

Later, lunchtime salary men and kids in colors herded me underground, into a tube train that tunneled over to Ashi Plaza. I was pressed against a high school girl who had worked her hair into a purple carnation. Flickering bees lavished the petals with drunken orbits, programmed into them by the holographic projectors in her permed stamens. A tongue of light flicked out at a bee and reeled it in to the toothless, translucent mouth of a lizard, coded to perch on a boy's shoulder. What I wanted to know was how the builders of the tube system got around the titanium bulkheads layered over the Geofront.

I bled lunch out at an okonomiyaki joint, grinding egg and kimchi cud as I looked down on Ashi Plaza from a mezzanine. Asuka might have been at the plaza; specialty stores and boutiques with Italian names encroached on the edges of the square, but I couldn't see her staying after depleting her cash reserves. The fountain at the center of the plaza wasn't her thing; it served no other purpose than to spout discrete missiles of chlorinated water at screaming children and their exhausted mothers. I watched them, knowing Asuka would have commented on how impractical a firing sequence that would be for a SAM turret. And I agreed. And I left.

I got my answer about the titanium bulkheads a few hours later: water jets, escorted on wide-load rigs into a construction site on Boulevard Three. The jet planted stout, telescoping legs beneath the armor plating exposed in the foundation walls before extending an elongated head over the bulkhead. It was a giant electric cake mixer until an operator hit a switch and the thing sang ribbons of metal off the whole, which after an hour was anything but.

I wondered which of the twenty-two layers they were cutting, and how tall the building would be for the footprint the workers had dug. If they had to dig any deeper. I wondered if the workers knew that if the building was tall enough and wide enough, they'd dig themselves to the start of the world. They probably weren't paid to dig that far.

I watched the buildings on the walk back to Pier 3; their faces, glimmering mirrors reflecting yellows and oranges at their zeniths; their pillars, rooted in the bedrock like industrial oaks; every last one a teacher's pet, raising antennae and signs higher and straighter than the last, brimming with answers to questions I've been too afraid to ask.

Since I'd left Tōgendai in the morning, it had absorbed a load of tourists and off-the-clock citizens, soaking in hibachi smoke or the Creole North music scene. I sat on a toadstool of a mooring pillar for about two seconds before a jazz quartet veered into their set further down the pier. I tried ignoring it, I did, but a bend in the song's pitch looped under me, began carrying me off to the temporary stage the band plucked and strummed and blared from.

Then, way across the water, I spied the control lock bracing the edge of Mandelbrot Lake. I noticed its interlaced hands of steel, meditating in the rim of blasted rock, holding back new ruin with quiet ease. I sat back down, and smiled.

My walk was over.

* * *

There's a crumple of paper as Asuka sideswipes me with one or eight of her bags. "So the biggest, dumbest stooge got hitched, eh? Some Setsuko chick."

"I guess so," I say, scooting back onto the mooring pillar. The concert's over. The crowd crumbles into chattering cliques that drift past me and Asuka.

"You 'guess'? You and Hikari had more than enough time to talk behind my back while I was getting washed up last night."

"What's that mean?" She tilts her chin down at me, eyebrows aloft. "Asuka, we just shot the breeze."

"Fine, don't talk about it," she huffs. "I really don't care."

"I haven't put that much thought to it, that's all. It is what it is."

Asuka frowns. Her cheeks puff up to pouting, then deflate. She's too content to nurture the argument. Or too hungry. She's okay with the first food tent we come to further down the pier. Dinner is a fried pork cutlet sweating grease on a paper plate. She finishes eating and sucks down half of her ginger ale before she finally takes issue with something. "I would've told you about the free shuttle coming back this way if I knew you were going to get this sweaty," she tells me. "Look at you."

"I'll dry off." But she doesn't wait, plucking some napkins from a back pocket and wiping my face.

"Stop squirming…" From a drawstring bag she conjures a camera – a high end, silver slip that stares at me with its huge unblinking eye. She scoots closer to me, holding the shutter at arm's length. I mutter. No matter how much I iron my face out, I'll still come out looking like a drunken llama, I just know it. Click.

"It's not even that humid," I say.

"I know – it's kind of a skin thing." Asuka's thumbing a tab on the camera's backside. Her fingers, her hands, the arms tensioned into her sleeveless top; dry to the surgically-repaired bone. "I didn't feel like waiting."

"What's the rush?" I ask. "I thought we could walk down to Pier 2. The tour guide, he was saying there's an exhibit there. About all the new buildings, the bridges, everything." Asuka shrugs one shoulder like she has a nerve condition. "Well, what about the machines they used to dredge ground zero when they started rebuilding?"

"What about them?"

I tell her what the guide said: that back then all the excavators in the region had been dedicated to the Old Tokyo Reclamation Project. The project didn't get very far off the ground, but it wasn't like anyone knew that at the time. The Tokyo-3 planning board ended up having to improvise. Somehow or another, they came into about a dozen huge impellers, like for a ridiculously large submarine. The engineers in charge of the dredging had the impellers modified as suction excavators – giant silt vacuums.

"You don't say," she musters around her last sip of soda.

"No…" The camera goes down to her lap. Her eyes come up. "I think that's all the guide knows. Check out a picture of one of those impellers. Remember the diving suit they stuffed Unit-02 in? The propulsion rig for the suit? That's what those impellers were for. Asuka, they retrofitted your D-Type equipment to dredge the crater. To make this place."

"How…" She flicks her wrist. The cup topples end over into the nearest receptacle, "industrious."

I open my mouth. She nods at the red brick walkway. The camera rises. It chirps and whirs beneath her magic fingers. She pauses to adjust her ponytail. She nods at the red brick walkway. I close my mouth.

For the first time, I notice the water craft sprinkled on the lake: water taxis, tour cruisers, yachts or paddle boats. They're all rice grains from this distance, too far away for me to hear them churn or chug, or to hear them grunt from the buildup of lactic acid in their thighs. What I hear are the waves chomping on the slate pier walls below us, warning me and Asuka further inland. To the garage. To the car. The sound must be louder to Asuka, because she takes heed. And I follow.

* * *

We stop for gas.

* * *

My problem isn't that it's midnight, or that Asuka and I are on the wrong side of the tracks. In Tokyo-3, there is no wrong side of the tracks. The city's houses, its schools, train stations and shopping malls – even if you're talking places that were around to have survived the explosion of Unit-00 – are about twenty years young or less.

Think of a bee hive. Just do that. Its workers, its soldiers. Think of the straight line it draws between function and design. Scale it up. Make it metal. Give it missiles. The oldest parts of the city, like where our old apartment slumps? They're function with rainbow decals slapped onto their smooth edges – those arcades, those laundromats, those empty backyards with receding grasslines. One day, Old Town-3 will forget its honeycomb chassis.

My problem is that I know what these old neighborhood modules supported. My problem is that I am Old Town-3. My problem is that I'm pulling up to the side of my old compartment with my old comrade, and my other comrades are not here and they never will be.

* * *

I'll tell Asuka all her bags are missing from the trunk as soon as she puts down the bolt cutters. She doesn't need the cutters, anyway; the fence between us and the apartment complex has a hole in it. Asuka stuffs the shears into her backpack and crouches beneath the dead, chain link skin curled back on itself. I scuttle through after her, lugging my gas can with a hunchback gait. We're taking a side entrance, through an emergency exit door clinging to its top hinge. The distance from the fence to the side is shorter than the distance to the front, but we still have a good sixty meters. I can't help looking back.

Now I'm glad we rented a black car; I know it's there only by the sliver of night light tracing its roof. There's no moon out tonight. All the light poles here hang their dark heads at being taken off the grid. But every little bit of stealth helps, on the off chance someone stumbles by. There were never any clubs or convenience stores near the apartment to draw people, soused, rowdy, what have you. And if there had been any establishments, Misato couldn't have supported them all on her own. She couldn't have…Nah.

Sure, Misato claimed her share of watering holes – dives in sister neighborhoods – but more often she brought the bar back home; the only time she'd nurse a Yebisu would be when draped over her veranda to look down at the city, as I'm looking now from the complex courtyard. I never found the courage to ask Misato what she thought as she stared and drank, or what she felt. Tokyo-3 was a different animal back then – not even an animal, not with all those oiled, grinding parts. But I hope she felt warmer up here than I do–

"Hey."

Some bony part of Asuka catches my shoulder. "Watch where you're going," she hisses. "If you spill that gas on me…" She doesn't bother finishing. I don't want her to. Her ponytail swishes into the blackness of the stairwell. I think she snaps her fingers until the concrete risers turn in on themselves and upward in a wandering spotlight. Asuka turns her little piece of sun flare right into my eye. "Where's your torch, man?"

Asuka's halfway up the second flight by the time I snap on my own flashlight. I slosh up after her, ticking off floors when I can't make out the numbered signs at each landing. I'm skirting by the exit doors not already resting on the ground, or missing. Shining my light beyond the door frames, I see into the inner apartment ring, where the empty wait to be filled. "It seems like a waste, you know? All these people moving back here, and they're tearing this place down," I say.

"By here, you mean, what, the city?" I only hear her echo down to me, and her low-cut boots turning in the grit. But she knows I'm nodding. "Why would you stay in a place where you have nowhere to buy food or have fun? Think a sec, Shinji, there's nothing around here to keep anyone rooted."

"It wouldn't stay like that forever," I answer.

"But who the hell would want to wait?"

"It's just…a waste…" Asuka doesn't respond this time. She's satisfied with being a floor above me, taking two steps at a time, wheeling further up with each scratch in the dust.

I lurch out onto the twelfth floor atrium, spotlighting the door at the end of the hall; Asuka's already crouched by **M. KATSURAGI**, hefting a small science experiment from her bag. I think it's supposed to be a magnetic reader, or whatever's needed to actually break into an apartment with an electric front door. Then I think something else as I set the gas can down. "Wait a minute… if there's no power running to the building, how are you going to open the door?"

"Think life safety," she says. "The doors have to have emergency batteries, in case the juice goes out." She stops playing with the device to swat me in my shin. "Quit standing over me."

"You really think the batteries still work after eight years?"

"Have to, completely deenergized doors fail open."Asuka stands up, over her upturned torch. Her shadow moves across the ceiling like a thunderhead. "There's always manual, Shinji. Just like old times. Didn't think I'd find out about all those push-ups you've been doing, did you?"

"But there's no crank shaft for this door."

"Then I guess you can go back to the car and wait for me," she says.

"I guess I could."

I don't think I said that in a way that would catch her attention. But her breath snags. All the ticks and twitches that mark Asuka, she stops them. "And then you can call your boy. I know Hikari gave you his number, too."

"Asuka, she was doing do me a fav –"

I start backing up to the door when I can smell the mint gum on her breath.

"Or just go back to her place," she breathes. "Why don't you open _her_ door? She's been off work for hours, now, hasn't she? You can do each other favors. You can shoot the breeze. For all you know you're one washed bowl or steamed curtain away from getting more of her pie."

My tongue fumbles the words that would make Asuka small and silly. Until I recover them, I'm reeling. It doesn't help that the door swooshes open and I topple back over the threshold, cutting myself on the rusting jamb. I turn my flashlight on my left palm; it makes so much sense that the grime and blood comingle just above the nexus of pain.

"What did you do?" Asuka asks.

"What did _you_ do?"

Now that we've cleared that up, Asuka steps through, the puppy eyes she makes at her strip reader saying it all: weeks of reading, web surfing, coding, and blackmailing, wasted.

Then she smiles.

We gather our things from outside, setting them on the bare dining room floor. Asuka's stuffed an epic in her backpack: gloves, goggles, a fire-retardant blanket, petroleum jelly, wool socks, scissors, two cans of Diet Pepsi. Good Lord, _Pepsi_. The parade doesn't end until the bag regurgitates a larger lamp, which she sits on the floor, lens side up. Asuka switches on the lamp, and we start.

She starts, hauling a gas can off to Misato's room. I stay at the kitchen's edge, peering across the threshold into the living room, seeing all the way to the sliding glass door of the veranda without so much as a cockroach to cast shadows in between. Whoever's sitting in Misato's chairs, or farting on her pillows, or setting food on her coffee table, or watching her T.V., I hope they're enjoying themselves. I hope they choke.

My nails have been stoking the dull ache in my palm, and the pain flares brilliantly. That can't be good: I'm wearing a tee, white except for the hex patterns running up to the armpits; I might leave bloody fingerprints on outside walls and handrails; I could get petrol in my wound should I ever get it in me to douse the kitchen counter. None of this is good.

I need to wash my hands. Dumbfounded, the washroom faucet sputters hard water into my palms. I dry my hands on napkins as a cold heat diffuses out from my spine. The chill smolders on the roof of my mouth by the time I'm back at the living room. Asuka's there, shaking the last drops from the first can onto the center of the floor – I won't have to yell. "Water's still on."

"Super," she says, her back turned on me. "I gotta get this shit off of my boots. It'll take some doing to set this off without blowing myself up."

"Why is it still on? If there's no power…"

"The pumps are far enough away to still be on the grid?" The empty can falls off her fingers, hits the carpet like a footfall in a swamp marsh. "Busted valve seat? The rise and disturbing prevalence of public works negligence in a country of historically supreme work ethic? Take your pick."

Asuka ambles over to scoop up the other gas can and scoff at me; it's so her to confuse acquiescence with fear.

"Jesus, we're not going to get caught. The building never had sprinklers in the first place and the fire alarm panel is disconnected." I duck my head into the living room to see Asuka trundle down the hall, and the vapor drift almost sends me the rest of the way down. A step and a half from my room, she raps her knuckles on the naked drywall. "I'm not even sure if these walls are fire-rated. It's a small miracle they even let us stay in this death trap."

"How come you know all this crap?" I ask between gulps of saliva, reminding myself I didn't just siphon five liters of gasoline. I'm doing that a lot.

"How does the sparrow know to land on the third blue roof? You have your crap-gathering networks," says Asuka, "and I have mine." I'd beg to differ – I keep connections as well as a pair of scissors in a string factory – but she's already facing my shoji, sliding it open. Peering in. Sliding it closed. "Now, let's see what you're made of, Shinji."

I blink. Asuka's built herself sturdy – arms crossed, feet planted in the stain guard carpet. The gas can sits obediently beneath the shapely wickets of his master. Her half-smile cures in the anemic light; now she can stare hard at me without blinking back. She's not blinking. "Asuka, I don't...I just want this to be over…"

"I just want you to do your part," she tells me.

I can't look at her. I'm hard pressed to look at anything in here. No table leg to tether myself to, no SDAT to drown myself in sound with, no chair to sit in to play the cello I don't have. Not enough to keep my eyes from floating out to where Tokyo-3 grows tall, digs deep, runs hot. The very tops of the city peek over the veranda and wink at me in the dark with a dozen ruby eyes. I appreciate that this place will be far hotter than anything down on the lake if I stick around – just not as much as Asuka might. "I'll make sure you get to your lecture on time tomorrow."

I walk back out through the kitchen, knowing she'll slump me like a sack of wet rice before I reach the foyer. But she doesn't. I suppose she's saving up for the ride back to Nagoya, when I and her tongue are localized. She'll at least opt for a place where the air won't slick her throat. So for now, Asuka holds back the flood. And I get to stagger out the front door with my fealty unquestioned. Thank God for small miracles.

Very small.

* * *

I put the car in drive and glide away from the building. Our old place is nested on a top floor, where the verandas slope back from the street, but I can see that one corner up high glows, a morsel of sun trapped inside it. I don't think Asuka looks; she's uniquely qualified at staring at her lap and kneading out all the lumps in her backpack.

"Your bags are gone."

"Old intel," she says. She moves again, clutching something she pulled out of her pack and spooling it around her hand. "No telling how they would've burned, anyway."

"Like bags full of expensive clothes, if I had to guess."

"You don't have to guess." After I make a left turn, her fingers pry mine off the wheel, waltz on my left palm, and give the cut a cool, liquid bee sting that dulls the ache. She wipes the alcohol from my hand with her thumb. "You don't have to do anything."

A straight shot for a few blocks. The neighborhood evolves up ahead, with street lamps spouting dunce caps of light onto either side of the road. I can look at Asuka, now. I do, but her eyes are watching her hands fold a wad of gauze over the wound. "You couldn't have expected me to help you," I say. She's three silent laps around my hand. "What should I have done? What were you waiting for me to do?"

"God, Shinji, that's up to me? If it makes you feel any better, I saved your room for last and ran out of fuel before I got back to it."

"Not really."

"I said, 'if'." Asuka squeezes; my knuckles huddle up like marbles. "Relax. It's over now, just like you wanted. Put in that CD you like, and relax, okay? It was just a place."

"If it was just a place, then why the hell did you have to burn it down? Why did you burn down our home?"

The binding constricts and settles. She's finished. "It wasn't my home."

The tires scream. Asuka shouts. The backpack leaps from her lap and mauls the dashboard. Dread lurches into my forebrain, shatters, splashes inside my skull. Our haunches rise and are slammed back into our seats. The universe levels off, so I know it's me that Asuka's gaping at.

My foot comes off the brake.

Trickling, down through my chest, pooling in my lungs – a simmering cauldron. I churn out a shaky breath and look at the bandage around my hand. Asuka wrapped it in enough gauze so that the blood won't show through.

"What the fuck are you smoking?" There's a core of mirth to her words. Asuka doesn't look mad either, but her lopsided grin threatens to slough off, a sticker with faulty backing. She could have a gun pressed to her back for all I know. Asuka should have rifled through the pictures she took today, studied the smile she saddled next to my llama-face on Pier 3. I wait until she's having trouble tent-poling the façade, right before her flush cheeks fall…

Longer than that. Asuka's lips crawl in like crackling strips of bacon. "Shinji…she –"

Then I grab her bag out from between her legs and spill out the driver-side door.

I jangle back up the street where I made that left, already needing a blow. The dark isn't the only thing slowing me down – my shorts have so much inertia I think about taking them off. Can't. My house keys are in the pockets, cohabitating with Misato's cross and my wallet and my phone…

I chop my feet to dig the Sanyo out past my keys and a cluster of napkins. The scrap paper comes out next; though I don't recognize the phone number that goes with it, I've obliterated the street on the paper in a hundred-hundred simulations. The street should be very close by. I dial, hit full stride, and barrel right, watching our old place flounce back into view. It ogles the downtown skyline with one orange eye.

* * *

I wobble onto the twelfth floor, and all I can think about is lack of oxygen. In my lungs. In our old place. Soon I'll catch my breath and walk down the hall. I'll watch **M. KATSURAGI** slide into the wall, hear that inner space inhale the fresh outside air. I'll be kindling in a bloom of carnivorous heat.

I'm flung back to my first sortie with Rei, when I was slouched and vacuum-sealed in that embarrassing second skin. When the Fifth Angel drilled into the city while waiting to touch me again. When we were going to die, as I so told her. I swallowed it, as I do all facts I'm given – stared at the old gum on the rubber floor mats – and waited for the fact to demonstrate itself. I walk up to **M. KATSURAGI** with that preserved, easy acceptance.

The door sighs open. Hot feelers from the scorching body inside steal over me. I'm not alive – just the recipient of what has been given to me up to this moment.

I'm given the smoky foyer, the run of the blackened kitchen. But a nation of flames revels in the living room, its banners billowing up the walls.

I'm given the washroom and its furo. I'm given Asuka's fire-retardant blanket, which I soak in the furo along with a ribbon of tee-shirt I sheared off. My ragged, sopping mask. The blanket I fit snug about my shoulders and head, then double up like the skin folds on a bloodhound. I dare to keep the blanket loose at my feet; Misato wore a kimono once, when Pen-Pen belly-flopped into her bound legs like a Honda ramming a resplendent light pole. Then everything became Misato toppling over, flapping flightless wings, and Asuka, Asuka laughing her ass off…

Loose at my feet. I fly.

My eyes are closed and hooded over. Fire brushes me like the kindled hands of groupies – everywhere is roaring celebrity. I measure my steps to my bedroom against the year I was late for school or my cell phone rang on my bed or I ran stark naked from the furo to my room because Misato forgot to wash the towels again. I break to the right here, always, always _here_…

I throw my weight over my hip, cartwheeling. I'm not surprised when the corridor does not give at first – I'm not alive, after all, but the mere sum of my orders, a gourd for the selfishness of others. I am the most retardant thing ever. I think of it this way, and think only of this, because otherwise I'll think of her smile and it'll burn with me…

Then my bedroom door caves to my shoulder like a balsa wood sternum. The door falls inward, clapping the tatami mat before tumbling me off. I account for each of my arms and legs as I draw them in. The pain in my collar, the hot soot eddies starting to swirl on the roof of my room, they keep me low.

Asuka told me the truth, at least as far as her not getting around to my room. For this very short moment, flames tease the front wall closest to the common corridor, saturating the air inside the empty room with heat. Nothing squatting or hanging or standing in here to burn, anyway. The inferno outside the room throws a rippling dawn on the vacant walls. In the watery corner of my eye, a low mound bends the firelight as if crouching before a projector. I look straight at the shape to gauge its distance and iron spikes drive themselves into my shoulder; there's no dial, no circuit to attenuate the pain.

I'm alive again. Must be those, younger, fresher facts. Truer facts, invocations of protection Rei whispered to me as I sagged over old gum on a locker mat.

Listen to me – crammed with holdovers from my entry plug days. Take the video overlay we summoned with our thoughts. Like those, I superimpose Nozomi's ridiculous biomass over the hot void. I can see how her tweed overalls would ignite; how her pasta-dog murals would blister, pucker and pop. How tubes of acrylic paint would burst like Kozo Fuyutski's aorta. All of it. It would take forever to burn.

_Ikari…?_

I cough out a piston's worth of combusted air and toggle the overlay back off, utterly undressing the room.

So it's my fault Rei is sitting in the corner, naked.

* * *

We crouch behind a dumpster.

Rei looks depleted. It might just be my shirt on her, caked with body salt and pit sweat…and smoke-inundated, _and_ carved up to make my face cloth. Or it's the blanket riding her shoulders, a charcoal cape and cowl. But then I raise the flashlight to her face, which hovers in place of the moon. Grey lunar seas fill the basins below her eyes. Someone's plastered her hair to her scalp and teased a thousand reflections out of it, like blue broken glass. Ever since we sat down, she's been investigating a weed that's wriggled up through a crack in the sidewalk.

Rei looks dazzling. I wonder if she'll say 'thank you' if I tell her that. I wonder if she'll say anything at all.

"We can get something to eat once we're out of here. The MOS Burger out here sells veggie patties." I dig through the backpack, remembering the Pepsi Asuka pouched there. "Thirsty?"

Rei blinks. She breathes, I think. I click the flashlight off. Midnight closes in on her face – seals it with silence. She could be a 30-gallon garbage bag. She could be dead. I drape my arm around her to feel her body heat through the synthetic wool of the blanket. I feel the scratch of the fabric on my naked ribs. I feel bone, too. Not surprising – it seems I always end up putting my hands where they don't belong on Rei. She was lighter than a dream when I hauled her out of the room. She was always a thin slice of cake, too…but had mom been this light, this skinny when she was, what, twenty-three? If I hold Rei any tighter, I'll break something inside her.

I hope she lost something in the fire.

Our old apartment faces the front of the building. From where I'm sitting, on the side of the complex, I can't see the blaze, can't even tell it's there. Like hell it isn't there. It's rollicking.

I start quenching its place in my mind. Can't help it. It's nearly one o' clock. Today will be tomorrow if I nod off. And I don't know enough about this Rei to be sure she'll still be by my side when I wake up. I'm not ready to find out yet, and Rei might not be ready, eith –

I hear sirens. A whole hell of a lot of sirens exploding up the hillside. I think about the jazz quartet earlier today, but now spiked with gamma radiation, feral and huge and green. Their instruments blast jet-engine homicidal glee. Their rage set punches through my eardrums...

I can hear tomorrow. I hear them asking Rei how'd she get to living so goddamn far off the grid. I hear them puzzling it out behind two-way glass and over coffee mugs stamping brown hoops on affidavits. Humming Earth, Wind & Fire as they run her ungodly metrics. Promising her they'll take good care of her, good _good_ care, just you see, kiddo. I hear the hollow clap of their mitts on her coat hanger collar. I hear nothing from Rei.

I stand. I swoon. The fire's melted everything in my head; the ore makes me top-heavy. I can't hear the sirens until my head slops back: they're closer. They're freight trains screwing beneath the stars.

I click the flashlight back on, showcasing the mute druid next to me. "Come on, we can't wait anymore…_Rei.._."

I'd only have to drag Rei far enough so that we're not seen by the first responders. I'd feel better about our chances if she carried herself. She's not crippled – yes, I pulled her up from my bedroom floor, but I saw her naked legs lock straight at her knees. I watched her take a smooth step back.

"Rei, you have to give me something here…"

I'm bent over, grabbing a fistful of fuzzy cloth and sinew, when headlights slam the dumpster's shadow against the apartment façade. The radio chatter will come next. Oh, yes, with the fire trucks purring in place on the street, the clinking of buckled belts and harnesses, primary colors wheeling in a lunatic centrifuge. But it's too damn quiet here. The fire engines are still farting chaos a few blocks down.

I step out past the dumpster's edge. Rei moves with me. The gentle, felt tension she puts on my wrist keeps me from tilting too far into the high beams. Between dual coronas someone stands, their silhouette tall and charred black.

"Where the fuck have you been?" Touji's voice. His true voice, a guttural boom now that puberty has stopped choking up on his vocal cords. The sound barrels down from a high place as Rei and I scurry through the hole in the fence. "I don't get so much as one fucking messenger pigeon from you for eight fucking years, and then from outta the middle of the goddamn blue my phone is bitch fitting all over my table and it's your_ holy shit is that Ayanami_?"

"Drive," I say, packing Rei and myself into the back of his coupe. Thicker than twins in the womb, we are. My shoulder complains as I reach back out to shut the door. Touji's about to complain louder – he scowls back at us from the driver's seat. Then he gives Rei the once over. The crossness drains from his face like low tide. "Touji!"

"Shit…" he says, cuffing the stick shift with his palm. The car shimmies, smoothing out as we curl around to the front of the building. Past everything going on in the front of the building. I don't have to watch the fire. Touji's face is dry and gaping and orange enough for the both of us. His eyes snag mine in the rearview mirror. "Are you for real?"

"I think you should take the scenic route," I say. Rei slumps back as the car shoots away from the spectacle. A pothole leans her onto my shoulder. She stays there. Careful not to elbow her in the throat, I twist around to peek through the rear window. Down at the side of the building, a red and blue pulse quickens, brightens...

We turn down a side street. The neighborhood evolves up ahead, with street lamps spouting dunce caps of light onto either side of the road. The street is empty.

"You know I gotta be at the Tea Bone at six o' clock, don't you? Six shitting o' clock, Shinji. Do you understand? Do you not work for a living?"

I take in air to speak and I taste what Rei's hair smells like. It's the generic shampoo I found in those suitcases that passed for Geofront barracks; prepackaged industrial cloy. "Acoustic Designer."

"Even Aida's Soldier-of-Fortune ass calls me once a …" Touji trails off. The cup in the center console disappears in his paw as he chugs its contents. He takes the back of his hand to his mouth and flips the cup into the leg space for the front passenger seat, a styrofoam mass grave.

"But it's like this:" Our reflected eyes lock again, "tea can't just make itself. Like acoustics can't…design themselves – don't say they can, dick. Tea can't make itself and Setsuko, love her to death, Setsuko couldn't make tea between S and U." He shakes his head. "She brews the numbers, I boil the water – _in the morning_. I need sleep, Ikari. I think we all do."

He's right, but that's not why I'm snickering. This rugby fullback, this basketball star, this really, really big and tall person, in a shop apron, tying a magenta bow around his waist: it's just tasty, old-fashioned bait. I pull Rei close enough for her to feel the watery laughter vibrate in my chest. The laughter resonates – I can't stop it from migrating up my throat. But it leaves my mouth as a hiccup. The water's reached my eyes and is well on its way to spilling out.

Touji says, "I'm just a little amped, man…" Then he drops us down on a busier, larger street, where Toyotas flash us their red flanks as they hum past. He watches the road.

Over Rei's dipped crown, through the cracked port window, the skyline chases us. Not for long, though; Touji's place is nearby; new and cheap, to entice young skilled labor to a city jonesing for it. People like Touji and Hikari.

End of Blanking Bridges

A/N: Credit goes to the EvaGeeks episode wiki for the Mandelbrot Lake reference, _and_ for the floor plan of Misato's apartment. They were both very helpful. Not much else to say on this front. Thank you for reading. Hope I didn't eat too many sacred cows.

Random A/N: And speaking of burned mammals: I once received a comment for one of my stories from a fire fighter. I thought of him as I was writing that inferno scene. Sir, if you're reading this: Shinji should be really, really dead, shouldn't he? He should be five different smoky flavors of crisp, shouldn't he? Got a minute? Search for the floor plan on the Eva Geeks wiki, under "Misato's Apartment". How long would it take him to run from the kitchen to his room and back, shrouded in a flame-proof blanket?

Ah, well. Shinji did, after all, open a super-heated hatch to save one girl, and jump into a volcano to save another. Boy stays in the kitchen, is all.

People, it's the year 2023, alright? A scientist did it.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.

What do you mean it's not college basketball season…? :-(


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